Broken Night
by Old Fiat
Summary: Number 12, Grimmauld Place was dark the night when Sirius left.


**Broken Night**

Old Fiat

Disclaimer: I own absolutely _nothing_. Seriously. Not even my shirt. ;)

IMPORTANT: If you can, try and listen to Damien Rice's song "Silent Night" (just type in 'silent night damien rice' on YouTube and there'll be a video by "Brokenword1984" which you can use to listen to it). It'll kind of... enhance the experience of this story. Though, if you can't, I guess that's fine, too. This story is just kind of written to go along with it.

Anyway, enjoy!

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Number 12, Grimmauld Place was dark the night when Sirius left.

The painted forefathers of the House of Black sat sleeping, resting their pale, cracked oil heads against their gilded frames. Their shoulders rose and fell in their portraits. One or two gave brief, snuffling snores as they shifted in their sleep. One rested behind heavy black drapes, both day and night, though its occupant was easily woken.

But it was peaceful that night. No footsteps interrupted the silence. The dust settled on the once-well polished wood floors as Kreacher curled up under the boiler, his large eyes flickering guiltily every few moments towards the photograph containing the five last children to bear the name of Black: Andromeda, Bellatrix, Narcissa, Sirius and Regulus. They stared out of the picture, each one wearing their own proud expression. Kreacher's eyes eventually slid shut and he slept, despite the knowledge that those five children would be the last to bear the family name and how much that frightened him.

Up in the late Black matriarch's room, a large, gray hippogriff named Buckbeak lay, its steely eyes closed and its wings folded carefully around it. It hardly made a sound as it slept; only the occasional snapping of its large beak at imagined ferrets, a sound inaudible beyond the chamber.

Nothing stirred in the room of Sirius himself. People moved in the photographs around the walls, but they too were silent—trapped in times much happier than the present. A drawer sat half-pulled out of its dresser, left open when the owner ran suddenly from the space, not even shutting the door properly in his haste.. The drawer was filled with letters; some old, some new; some of writers living, some dead; some written in faded ink, other in smudged pencil. Some had been forgotten long ago by their writers, some of the writers had even forgotten the recipient.

But they would never be forgotten by him.

Moonlight leaked in through the slats of the shutters and moth-eaten curtains covering the windows in Orion Black's old study. Old documents were sitting, resting upon the intricately carved desk. The room had not been touched since the patriarch's death in 1979. The silvery light slid over the dust covered gas lamp still sitting with the papers on the oak surface, over the mahogany, green velvet-backed chair, over the tarnished handle of the door which connected the study to that of his wife, the late Walburga Black. It was she who had locked it in 1979 and it was she who had been buried with the keys to both his and her own in 1985.

A blurred and faded photograph sat on the mantle in the salon. It contained an old black and white picture of a young woman—no older than perhaps sixteen or seventeen—who looked directly into the camera. A gentle smile played around her small, carefully curved lips, her warm gray eyes laughing at the photographer as she looked over her pleated silk-covered shoulder. Her long, dark hair fell over her back in large, smooth waves. On occasion, the girl's small smile would grow wider and she would begin to laugh, her eyes twinkling happily from behind the glass. Hardly anyone would recognize her as the same woman who had fallen to madness so many years before, who had locked up her and her husband's studies before her own death and whose portrait now hung in the hall, covered with thick, black drapes to keep it quiet during the day.

The house was silent, its old, crumbling walls settling in for a night without its final master. It rested silently, like the portraits, like Kreacher and Buckbeak, like the photographs and old letters in Sirius Black's room, like the long out-of-date documents and the gas lamp on the desk in Orion Black's old study, like the rusted doorknob, like the keys in Walburga Black's dead grasp, like the old picture sitting upon the mantle of a woman who had died with her sanity long before her departure from this world.

And for a few moments, the house slept.

And, some miles away and a long way beneath, a young man who had once slept, ate, drank, fought, cried and lived in the house, fell through a thin, ragged veil and finally reached the peace he had never found in the house, in life, and the friend he had lost so many years before.

As he tumbled from one life to the next, a loud _crack_ shattered the sleepy silence as a window by the mantle in the salon burst open and a sudden, ice cold wind swept through the house, blowing open the door to the salon as it went, waking all the portraits in the hall and sending dust flying through the air. The heavy curtains in front of the portrait of Walburga Black were suddenly wrenched open by some invisible force.

She said nothing for several moments, her gray eyes wide and her yellowish skin stretched taut in horror. She lifted her hands to her now mostly gray hair and for a second, sanity and wisdom flickered in her eyes.

"Sirius..." she whispered, dragging her fingers down her cheeks. "My son..."

And then, she screamed.

Kreacher woke from the cries of the paintings and rushed to shut the window, his awkward, lumpy feet slapping the floor loudly as he went.

The crash had awoken Buckbeak upstairs. He flapped his wings as he rose and the portraits began to scream, disrupting the air further, and gave a long, mournful, screeching cry.

The door to Sirius' room flew open from the rush of wind and an unfolded letter from his godson which lay atop the rest was caught by the air and flew upwards.

The wind slipped under the door to Orion Black's study, finally moving the dust that sat several inches thick over the floorboards, and some of the papers rustled as they slowly and briefly awoke from their seventeen year rest.

By the time Kreacher reached the salon, the window had snapped shut—pulled closed once more by the wind—but not before more of its heavy, hole-filled drapes had caught the photograph of Walburga Black on the mantle and knocked it down into the fireplace. The glass front cracked as it landed and a puff of ash rose up from the hearth, the dust spinning through the air and finally coming to rest once more on the framed picture, which was buried like its occupant and never looked upon again.

Number 12, Grimmauld Place was dark the night when Sirius left for the last time.

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**Yeah... I hope you liked this. I didn't do much rewriting on it; however, it was approved by both my older sister and Old Fiat northern France so... Yeah. Please review!**

**-OFsI**


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